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Don’t think the fiscal cliff impasse is over numbers — it’s over politics

So this is where the fiscal-cliff talks now stand: Politics and party orthodoxy reign supreme and trump even basic math. Boehner and President Obama are just $400 billion apart with their most recent offers, but that means nothing when it comes to closing a deal. The political differences are the real key to compromise, yet they are proving too difficult to overcome before the new year.

Both sides of the aisle are to blame, really. The Republicans are deeply committed to not raising tax rates, regardless of any potential blowback from the American public or fears they will be blamed for taking the country over the cliff.

And, just as stubbornly, Democrats do not want to budge on cutting entitlement programs. The president’s latest offer did not go very far in cutting the social-safety net. It did not make any deep cuts to Medicaid or even raise the eligibility age for Medicare, but that didn’t stop Democrats from crying foul. …

Part of the issue, congressional experts say, is that the cliff negotiations are a proxy for a bigger fight: control of the legislative agenda in 2013. Republicans would like to spend more time cutting dollars from the federal budget and overhauling the entitlement programs. Democrats want to move past the fiscal battles to enact the Affordable Care Act and possibly immigration reform.

It’s too bad that the superb Andy McCarthy column is already off the Headlines page. It has numerous gems on offer.

So dire are our straits that the stated national debt — an obscene $16.4 trillion — does not even begin to reflect the actual national debt, which probably exceeds ten times that amount when unfunded liabilities and bankrupt, bailout-craving states are factored in. The government annually spends over a trillion dollars more than the enormous $2.4 trillion it takes from us in taxes. Structurally, our “mandatory” spending (entitlements plus interest on the accumulated debt) puts us in a perennial deficit hole of $250 billion (and rising fast) before one thin dime is spent on “discretionary” items . . . such as the $700 billion defense budget. You may remember national defense — not wealth-redistribution, health care, or running commercials to recruit new food-stamps recipients — as the reason we actually have a federal government.

Washington’s current “fiscal cliff” farce results inevitably from the craven failure to confront geometrically unsustainable spending. We are already over the cliff. The public has seen fit to reelect as president a hard-nosed movement leftist who revels in chaos. For Obama, spending, which expands his taker-base, can never be high enough, so taxes will always have to rise. Beltway Republican leaders keep mistaking him for a conventional Washington Democrat with whom they can negotiate. But with the wind at his back thanks to his fellow statists in the press corps, Obama keeps pocketing GOP concessions, pushing for more, and relying on the media to depict Republicans as intransigent sentries for the “millionaires and billionaires.”

Last time, Republicans caved on the debt ceiling and joined Democrats in paving a road to hell — the looming explosion of tax hikes and indiscriminate defense cuts — with good intentions: Pushed to this brink, they assumed, the president would have to negotiate reasonably because his self-interest lay in the well-being of the nation. But no, the president’s self-interest is in the transformation of the nation along socialist lines. Diving over the “fiscal cliff” suits him just fine — after all, you can’t have transformation without tumult.

So this time, House conservatives told their leadership, “No.” The conservative punditocracy, which often seems more interested in cheerleading for the GOP than advancing conservative positions, is in something of a snit. Yet the calculation of conservatives who are accountable to an angry, anti-Washington base is simple: It makes little sense to cave on tax hikes, as Speaker John Boehner’s “Plan B” would have them do, when (a) Obama is offering nothing in return, nothing, on the only issue that matters — spending; (b) raising taxes on the top 1 percent of earners is a populist gimmick that does absolutely nothing to address our crisis; (d) Plan B has zero chance of being enacted; and (c) Obama has the media in his pocket, so it is pointless to take a futile, principle-breaking step in the hope of avoiding political blame — Republicans will be scapegoated regardless of what happens.

There is only one way to deal with a leftist revolutionary like Obama: Take away his credit card. We have again crashed into the debt ceiling. Because Republicans have not caved again on the ceiling as Obama was demanding, they have leverage: The Treasury Department, within a few weeks, will be out of accounting tricks to stave off a shut-down. There will be enough tax money streaming into the till to make bond payments, so — despite media scaremongering to the contrary — our full faith and credit will remain intact. So let Obama figure out how to run Leviathan on $2.4 trillion — which is over half a trillion more than the federal government was spending at the end of the Clinton years that Democrats portray as the golden era of fiscal responsibility.